Hopefully some people still remember me....Well my 2007 iMac running is 10.6.7 is driving me crazy!!!A few weeks ago it started "beachballin" but after a few shut downs everything seemed normal, note I was only running Safari and Mail. 300 GB HD only using about half of that. Well it started again Saturday nite and I have been unable to get my desktop back after many shut downs, fsck's, repair disk utility,..ect I was going to do a reinstall, but it starts to go through and then about 10 minutes into it, says not enough space!! There is 150 GB of free space!! I have not tried to restore from Time Machine yet. Please help and old forum member....

The Geniuses tend to just nuke and rebuild from scratch in order to "fix" things. In the case of disk corruption or a system part being broken it does work, they are just doing assembly line type repair. Nothing fancy and nothing non-Apple.

The Genius bar does come in handy for me to determine if it is a power supply on a mini, or the power supply or charging circuit on laptops since I don't have every power supply. They are the most knowledgeable in the store but how knowledgeable? YMMV.

For your problem if you boot from the install disk and on the second screen go to Utilities/DiskUtility you can erase the disk, then for the next step, under Utilities, you can run Restore System from Backup to rebuild from Time Machine.

If you get a new machine, when you first start it up it gives you a choice to rebuild from Time Machine or a backup. You won't lose any apps. It does a great job. There may be an app or two, QuickBooks is one that comes to mind, that will require a new serialization as they are machine specific. Office should be fine.

I think Reboot has it pretty much defined. I had the "disk is nearly full" warning once on my trusty G4 when I knew that it wasn't. It was some kind of extents overlap error (DW couldn't fix it, so I had to run TechTool Pro and then DW to straighten it out).

I'm wondering now if it is worth the trip or if I should just to a reformat and clean install.

Letting it just rebuild from TM would be less configuration and quicker than a reinstall then migration. You don't even need to install, it will just rebuild from your last backup point.

Although a clean install is a fresh start. You can do a clean install then run Migration Assistant when it starts back up to get a fresh system yet still retain your apps and settings. Make sure after running Migration Assistant that you run all software updates before trying to run any apps.

Make sure you erase the drive first before doing anything, to get rid of the disk corruption. You probably should Partition the whole drive again. Choose 1 Partition, then choose GUID under Options in the Partition tab.

Disconnect the TM drive after it rebuilds the system. After you're 100% positive that it's up and running again you'll probably want to erase the TM drive before letting it backup again as it will probably want to backup everything again anyway since it will see a new install.

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